John Daly: Legos quite possibly the perfect kids toy | Moms

John Daly

Occupation: My most important one is stay-at-home dad. I'm also an author, a contributing writer for a national news-commentary website and a part-time software developer and website designer.

About: I grew up in Lakewood, Colo., and came to Greeley in 1992 to attend UNC. After graduating from their business school, I became a permanent Greeley resident, going to work for a local software company and later starting a family. My first novel entitled 'From a Dead Sleep' was released in June of 2013. You can learn about it atjohndalybooks.com.

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Every six months or so, my wife and I used to get into an animated discussion over my stubborn reluctance to let our children have a video game system. Her case always came with a bullet list of arguments: it would build their hand-eye coordination; it would give them a head-start on technology they’ll use later in life; it would be great for family fun (aka, she wanted to play it to); and my personal favorite… everyone else’s kids have one!

The last one was certainly true. We have a lot of friends whose kids are the same ages as our children, and they all have a system. Some have more than one. It’s just the generation we live in. Kids love playing video games for hours on end, and parents love that video games keep their kids busy for hours on end. And sure, parents occasionally like to join their kids in the action too.

I held my stance firm for a long time. I really did. The fact that I was so adamant in my stance might have seemed kind of odd coming from a man, because a lot of grown men love to play video games. It's that very observation, however, the fueled my concerns.

I was convinced that if I wired my children - specifically my son - into the video game culture at an early age, he would likely become a casualty... A casualty of the zombie apocalypse.

I'm not talking about one of those poor, rotting souls from "The Walking Dead." I'm talking about video game zombies - those people who sit in basements for ridiculous periods of time, staring blankly at television screens with only their fingers moving as they feverishly work an advanced controller.

You see, I've known a number of such people throughout my life, and my experience has been that when someone enters the video game culture when they're young, they tend to remain entrenched in it through adulthood.

This bothers me because I believe it limits people's potential and drive, consuming far too much of their time that could be spent doing things that are productive - things that would advance their lives forward.

Being quite familiar with my son's addictive nature when it comes to the things that interest him, I was worried that he was susceptible to becoming one of those zombies.

Still, my wife eventually won the argument (which almost always happens, truth be told). I gave in and we bought a second-hand Wii. As expected, my son was in heaven. Playing video games became the center of his universe, and for the next six months, I was convinced that my greatest fears were indeed coming true. Despite us limiting our son's playing time to an hour a day and making that time contingent on good behavior, he became an addict.

I can't fully describe in words just how irritating the question, "Can I play Wii?" became to me. I heard it so often, I'm pretty sure it came to me in dreams in the middle of the night. All my son seemed to think about all day was video games.

At school, he talked about it non-stop with classmates, and he spent any sort of classroom downtime sketching pictures of video game characters down on paper.

When he'd get home from school each day, all he wanted to do was run downstairs and plop himself down in front of the television with a controller in his hand. And when I would remind him that homework always came first, it wasn't uncommon for him to give me some attitude. When he did get to play, he seemed to completely shut out the rest of the world, unable to hear or recognize anything that was going on around him, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

From a parental standpoint, the most aggravating part of it may have been the fact that my son and daughter couldn't manage to play a video game together at the same time. As far as my son was concerned, his younger sister always did EVERYTHING wrong, and he believed she was doing these things wrong on purpose just to make it harder for him to win at whatever game they were playing. This would routinely lead to a lot of arguing between the two and a lot of hurt feelings.

When it was time to turn off the system, my son nagged me relentlessly about wanting to play longer, to the point where I even had to send him to his room at those times when he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer.

Now, I realize that these aren't end of the world problems by any means, but for someone like me who didn't even want video games inside his family's house in the first place, I just couldn't find a single upside to our purchase of a system. Anything that lessens the chances of family harmony within the Daly household isn't looked upon very kindly by me.

Luckily, the story took an unexpected, welcome turn. To my utter shock, my son's love affair with video games ended abruptly about six months after it began. His inclusion into the zombie apocalypse was averted, and who do I have to thank for that?

The Lego Group.

For whatever reason, my son formed a new fascination with Legos, and his current obsession is creating buildings, vehicles, and landscapes with Lego® blocks. Playing video games is now only an occasional activity for him - one that he typically only turns to when he has a friend over.

I couldn't be happier about this. I think Legos are a great toy for kids because it gives them a chance to be creative, and learn some useful architectural skills in the process. Playing with Legos doesn't consume a child's senses, and it also doesn't shut them down socially. It's quite possibly the perfect child's toy.

Does this assure me that my son won't eventually be drawn back into the dark side of computerized gaming? No. But at least it gives me hope that he might not be living in my basement twenty years from now.